Thousands of subreddits have gone black in protest against API plans

Thousands of subreddits went dark today in protest against the platform’s proposed API changes. Reddit wants so much money for the use of the API by third-party Reddit clients that those clients will soon no longer be viable.

A subreddit on black

This concerns almost 5,500 subreddits that have gone black at the time of writing. Just over 7,000 have signed up for the blackout. Those numbers come from Reddark, a website created to keep track of which subreddits are participating in the protest and which have actually gone black. There is some delay in updating Reddark, so the actual number will be higher than 5500. The Reddark information comes from the official protest topics. ‘Going black’ means the subreddit is set to private and reading, posting, and commenting are not possible.

Together, those subreddits have almost 28,000 unique moderators and combined they have 2.4 billion subscribers. The largest participant is /r/funny with over 40 million subscribers. Subreddits such as aww, gaming, Music, Pics, science and todayilearned, with more than 30 million subscribers each, are also participating.

The intention is for the protest to last 48 hours, so until the end of Tuesday. There are also many voices within communities calling for a louder response and keeping subreddits blacked out indefinitely until Reddit meets the protesters’ demands. Examples are Music and aww.

The reason for the protests is mainly the proposed prices for API use. The focal point of that issue is the iOS Reddit app Apollo. Conversations between the Apollo developer and Reddit revealed that the maker will soon be spending $20 million per year in costs for the API. The Apollo maker makes money from its users, but that is not about 20 million dollars per year. Apollo, but also RIF, ReddPlanet and Sync will stop working on June 30, when the new API policy takes effect. The Apollo developer has a very detailed post made with his side of the story, including some technical details and answers to Reddit’s claims about Apollo and other apps.

If custom Reddit clients cease to exist, only the official Reddit app will remain. Many users are not satisfied with the functionality of that app and the amount of advertising shown there. On desktops there is of course the official Reddit website, but also old.reddit.com, the old interface, which many users prefer.

The new API conditions would also make the work of modtools and bots difficult or impossible, which would significantly hinder the work of moderators. In a report of a conversation between Reddit and moderators, written by the moderators, states that it has been promised that bots and modtools will be exempt from the API changes. Apps that help with accessibility, for example for the visually impaired, also receive an exception, but only if they are ‘non-commercial’.

Finally, NSFW content will soon only be viewable via the official Reddit client and the website. Reddit justifies this choice by saying that there is a lot of external pressure to properly enforce such content, for example with age checks, and that the platform therefore prefers to keep this under control itself.

Reddit leader Steve Huffman has said in interviews that Reddit is not profitable. The company is working on an IPO is said to take place in the second half of the year. Presumably, Reddit therefore wants to record more black figures in the books. In addition, Reddit disapproves of the use of the API to train large language models of artificial intelligences.

Reddit is a social medium that resembles a forum. Users can create their own subsections, called subreddits. Readers choose which subreddits they subscribe to and which ones land on their front page. The sorting of posts and comments is not done by default in chronological order, but via an algorithm that bases rankings on upvotes and downvotes from users. The site is one of the most popular on the Internet and also calls itself ‘the front page of the Internet’.

Update, 14.29: Reddark’s counter now stands at 6584 subreddits.